Part 3, Chapter 11 : 
There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between
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Author : David Graeber

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11 — There Never Was a West: or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In
Between

 
What follows emerges largely from my own experience of the alternative
globalization movement, where issues of democracy have been very much at
the center of debate. Anarchists in Europe or North America and indigenous
organizations in the Global South have found themselves locked in
remarkably similar arguments. Is “democracy” an inherently Western
concept? Does it refer a form of governance (a mode of communal
self-organization), or a form of government (one particular way of
organizing a state apparatus)? Does democracy necessarily imply majority
rule? Is representative democracy really democracy at all? Is the word
permanently tainted by its origins in Athens, a militaristic, slave-owning
society founded on the systematic repression of women? Or does what we now
call “democracy” have any real historical connection to Athenian
democracy in the first place? Is it possible for those trying to develop
decentralized forms of consensus-based direct democracy to reclaim the
word? If so, how will we ever convince the majority of people in the world
that “democracy” has nothing to do with electing representatives? If
not, if we instead accept the standard definition and start calling direct
democracy something else, how can we say we’re against democracy—a word
with such universally positive associations?

These are arguments about words much more than they are arguments about
practices. On questions of practice, in fact, there is a surprising degree
of convergence; especially within the more radical elements of the
movement. Whether one is talking with members of Zapatista communities in
Chiapas, unemployed piqueteros in Argentina, Dutch squatters, or
anti-eviction activists in South African townships, almost everyone agrees
on the importance of horizontal, rather than vertical structures; the need
for initiatives to rise up from relatively small, self-organized,
autonomous groups rather than being conveyed downward through chains of
command; the rejection of permanent, named leadership structures; and the
need to maintain some kind of mechanism—whether these be North
American-style “facilitation,” Zapatista-style women’s and youth
caucuses, or any of an endless variety of other possibilities—to ensure
that the voices of those who would normally find themselves marginalized or
excluded from traditional participatory mechanisms are heard. Some of the
bitter conflicts of the past, for example, between partisans of majority
voting versus partisans of consensus process, have been largely resolved,
or perhaps more accurately seem increasingly irrelevant, as more and more
social movements use full consensus only within smaller groups and adopt
various forms of “modified consensus” for larger coalitions. Something
is emerging. The problem is what to call it. Many of the key principles of
the movement (self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the
refusal of state power) derive from the anarchist tradition. Still, many
who embrace these ideas are reluctant, or flat-out refuse, to call
themselves “anarchists.” Similarly with democracy. My own approach has
normally been to openly embrace both terms, to argue, in fact, that
anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical. However, as
I say, there is no consensus on this issue, nor even a clear majority view.

It seems to me these are tactical, political questions more than anything
else. The word “democracy” has meant any number of different things
over the course of its history. When first coined, it referred to a system
in which the citizens of a community made decisions by equal vote in a
collective assembly. For most of its history, it referred to political
disorder, rioting, lynching, and factional violence (in fact, the word had
much the same associations as “anarchy” does today). Only quite
recently has it become identified with a system in which the citizens of a
state elect representatives to exercise state power in their name. Clearly
there is no true essence to be discovered here. About the only thing these
different referents have in common, perhaps, is that they involve some
sense that political questions that are normally the concerns of a narrow
elite are here thrown open to everyone, and that this is either a very
good, or a very bad, thing. The term has always been so morally loaded that
to write a dispassionate, disinterested history of democracy would almost
be a contradiction in terms. Most scholars who want to maintain an
appearance of disinterest avoid the word. Those who do make generalizations
about democracy inevitably have some sort of ax to grind.

I certainly do. That is why I feel it only fair to the reader to make my
own axes evident from the start. It seems to me that there’s a reason why
the word “democracy,” no matter how consistently it is abused by
tyrants and demagogues, still maintains its stubborn popular appeal. For
most people, democracy is still identified with some notion of ordinary
people collectively managing their own affairs. It already had this
connotation in the nineteenth century, and it was for this reason that
nineteenth-century politicians, who had earlier shunned the term,
reluctantly began to adopt the term and refer to themselves as
“democrats”—and, gradually, to patch together a history by which they
could represent themselves as heirs to a tradition that traced back to
ancient Athens. However, I will also assume—for no particular reason, or
no particular scholarly reason, since these are not scholarly questions but
moral and political ones—that the history of “democracy” should be
treated as more than just the history of the word “democracy.” If
democracy is simply a matter of communities managing their own affairs
through an open and relatively egalitarian process of public discussion,
there is no reason why egalitarian forms of decision-making in rural
communities in Africa or Brazil should not be at least as worthy of the
name as the constitutional systems that govern most nation-states
today—and, in many cases, probably a good deal more worthy.

In light of this, I will be making a series of related arguments and
perhaps the best way to proceed would be to just set out them all out right
away.
 

Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a
“Western” concept that begins its history in ancient Athens. They also
assume that what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politicians began
reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same
thing. Democracy is thus seen as something whose natural habitat is Western
Europe and its English- or French-speaking settler colonies. Not one of
these assumptions is justified. “Western civilization” is a
particularly incoherent concept, but, insofar as it refers to anything, it
refers to an intellectual tradition. This intellectual tradition is,
overall, just as hostile to anything we would recognize as democracy as
those of India, China, or Mesoamerica.
 


Democratic practices—processes of egalitarian decision-making—however,
occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given
“civilization,” culture, or tradition. They tend to crop up wherever
human life goes on outside systematic structures of coercion.
 


The “democratic ideal” tends to emerge when, under certain historical
circumstances, intellectuals and politicians, usually in some sense
navigating their way between states and popular movements and popular
practices, interrogate their own traditions—invariably, in dialogue with
other ones—citing cases of past or present democratic practice to argue
that their tradition has a fundamental kernel of democracy. I call these
moments of “democratic refoundation.” From the perspective of the
intellectual traditions, they are also moments of recuperation, in which
ideals and institutions that are often the product of incredibly
complicated forms of interaction between people of very different histories
and traditions come to be represented as emerging from the logic of that
intellectual tradition itself. Over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries especially, such moments did not just occur in Europe,
but almost everywhere.
 


The fact that this ideal is always founded on (at least partly) invented
traditions does not mean it is inauthentic or illegitimate or, at least,
more inauthentic or illegitimate than any other. The contradiction,
however, is that this ideal was always based on the impossible dream of
marrying democratic procedures or practices with the coercive mechanisms of
the state. The result are not “Democracies” in any meaningful sense of
the world but Republics with a few, usually fairly limited, democratic
elements.
 


What we are experiencing today is not a crisis of democracy but rather a
crisis of the state. In recent years, there has been a massive revival of
interest in democratic practices and procedures within global social
movements, but this has proceeded almost entirely outside of statist
frameworks. The future of democracy lies precisely in this area. Let me
take these up in roughly the order I’ve presented them above. I’ll
start with the curious idea that democracy is somehow a “Western
concept.”
 

 
Part I: On the Incoherence Of the Notion of the “Western Tradition”

 
I’ll begin, then, with a relatively easy target: Samuel P. Huntington’s
famous essay on the “Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington is a professor
of International Relations at Harvard, a classic Cold War intellectual,
beloved of right-wing think tanks. In 1993, he published an essay arguing
that, now that the Cold War was over, global conflicts would come to center
on clashes between ancient cultural traditions. The argument was notable
for promoting a certain notion of cultural humility. Drawing on the work of
Arnold Toynbee, he urged Westerners to understand that theirs is just one
civilization among many, that its values should in no way be assumed to be
universal. Democracy in particular, he argued, is a distinctly Western idea
and the West should abandon its efforts to impose it on the rest of the
world:
 

 
At a superficial level, much of Western culture has indeed permeated the
rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ
fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of
individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality,
liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church
and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese,
Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such
ideas produce instead a reaction against “human rights imperialism” and
a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for
religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures.
The very notion that there is a “universal civilization” is a Western
idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and
their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another (1993: 120).
 

 
The list of Western concepts is fascinating from any number of angles. If
taken literally, for instance, it would mean that “the West” only
really took any kind of recognizable form in the nineteenth or even
twentieth centuries, since in any previous one the overwhelming majority of
“Westerners” would have rejected just about all these principles out of
hand—if, indeed, they would have been able even to conceive of them. One
can, if one likes, scratch around through the last two or three thousand
years in different parts of Europe and find plausible forerunners to most
of them. Many try. Fifth-century Athens usually provides a useful resource
in this regard, provided one is willing to ignore, or at least skim over,
almost everything that happened between then and perhaps 1215 AD, or maybe
1776. This is roughly the approach taken by most conventional textbooks.
Huntington is a bit subtler. He treats Greece and Rome as a separate,
“Classical civilization,” which then splits off into Eastern (Greek)
and Western (Latin) Christianity—and later, of course, Islam. When
Western civilization begins, it is identical to Latin Christendom. After
the upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, however, the
civilization loses its religious specificity and transforms into something
broader and essentially secular. The results, however, are much the same as
in conventional textbooks, since Huntington also insists that the Western
tradition was all along “far more” the heir of the ideas of Classical
civilization than its Orthodox or Islamic rivals.

Now there are a thousand ways one could attack Huntington’s position. His
list of “Western concepts” seems particularly arbitrary. Any number of
concepts were adrift in Western Europe over the years, and many far more
widely accepted. Why choose this list rather than some other? What are the
criteria? Clearly, Huntington’s immediate aim was to show that many ideas
widely accepted in Western Europe and North America are likely to be viewed
with suspicion in other quarters. But, even on this basis, could one not
equally well assemble a completely different list: say, argue that
“Western culture” is premised on science, industrialism, bureaucratic
rationality, nationalism, racial theories, and an endless drive for
geographic expansion, and then argue that the culmination of Western
culture was the Third Reich? (Actually, some radical critics of the West
would probably make precisely this argument.) Yet even after criticism,
Huntington has been stubborn in sticking to more or less the same arbitrary
list (e.g., 1996).

It seems to me the only way to understand why Huntington creates the list
he does is to examine his use of the terms “culture” and
“civilization.” In fact, if one reads the text carefully, one finds
that the phrases “Western culture” and “Western civilization” are
used pretty much interchangeably. Each civilization has its own culture.
Cultures, in turn, appear to consist primarily of “ideas,”
“concepts,” and “values.” In the Western case, these ideas appear
to have once been tied to a particular sort of Christianity, but now have
developed a basically geographic or national distribution, having set down
roots in Western Europe and its English- and French-speaking settler
colonies.[211] The other civilizations listed are—with the exception of
Japan—not defined in geographic terms. They are still religions: the
Islamic, Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Orthodox Christian civilizations.
This is already a bit confusing. Why should the West have stopped being
primarily defined in religious terms around 1520 (despite the fact that
most Westerners continue to call themselves “Christians”), while the
others all remain so (despite the fact that most Chinese, for example,
would certainly not call themselves “Confucians”)? Presumably because,
for Huntington to be consistent in this area, he would either have to
exclude from the West certain groups he would prefer not to exclude
(Catholics or Protestants, Jews, Deists, secular philosophers) or else
provide some reason why the West can consist of a complex amalgam of faiths
and philosophies while all the other civilizations cannot: despite the fact
that if one examines the history of geographical units like India, or China
(as opposed to made-up entities like Hinduism or Confucianism), a complex
amalgam of faiths and philosophies is precisely what one finds.

It gets worse. In a later clarification called “What Makes the West
Western” (1996), Huntington actually does claim that “pluralism” is
one of the West’s unique qualities:
 

 
Western society historically has been highly pluralistic. What is
distinctive about the West, as Karl Deutsch noted, “is the rise and
persistence of diverse autonomous groups not based on blood relationship or
marriage.” Beginning in the sixth and seventh centuries these groups
initially included monasteries, monastic orders, and guilds, but afterwards
expanded in many areas of Europe to include a variety of other associations
and societies (1996: 234).
 

 
He goes on to explain this diversity also included class pluralism (strong
aristocracies), social pluralism (representative bodies), linguistic
diversity, and so on. All this gradually set the stage, he says, for the
unique complexity of Western civil society. Now, it would be easy to point
out how ridiculous all this is. One could, for instance, remind the reader
that China and India in fact had, for most of their histories, a great deal
more religious pluralism than Western Europe;[212] that most Asian
societies were marked by a dizzying variety of monastic orders, guilds,
colleges, secret societies, sodalities, professional and civic groups; that
none ever came up with such distinctly Western ways of enforcing uniformity
as the war of extermination against heretics, the Inquisition, or the witch
hunt. But the amazing thing is that what Huntington is doing here is trying
to turn the very incoherence of his category into its defining feature.
First, he describes Asian civilizations in such a way that they cannot, by
definition, be plural; then, if one were to complain that people he lumps
together as “the West” don’t seem to have any common features at
all—no common language, religion, philosophy, or mode of
government—Huntington could simply reply that this pluralism is the
West’s defining feature. It is the perfect circular argument.

In most ways, Huntington’s argument is just typical, old-fashioned
Orientalism: European civilization is represented as inherently dynamic,
“the East,” at least tacitly, as stagnant, timeless, and monolithic.
What I really want to draw attention to, however, is just how incoherent
Huntington’s notions of “civilization” and “culture” really are.
The word “civilization,” after all, can be used in two very different
ways. It can be used to refer to a society in which people live in cities,
in the way an archaeologist might refer to the Indus Valley. Or it can mean
refinement, accomplishment, cultural achievement. Culture has much the same
double meaning. One can use the term in its anthropological sense, as
referring to structures of feeling, symbolic codes that members of a given
culture absorb in the course of growing up and which inform every aspect of
their daily life: the way people talk, eat, marry, gesture, play music, and
so on. To use Bourdieu’s terminology, one could call this culture as
habitus. Alternately, one can use the word to refer to what is also called
“high culture”: the best and most profound productions of some
artistic, literary, or philosophical elite. Huntington’s insistence on
defining the West only by its most remarkable, valuable concepts—like
freedom and human rights—suggests that, in either case, it’s mainly the
latter sense he has in mind. After all, if “culture” were to be defined
in the anthropological sense, then clearly the most direct heirs to ancient
Greeks would not be modern Englishmen and Frenchmen, but modern Greeks.
Whereas, in Huntington’s system, modern Greeks parted company with the
West over 1500 years ago, the moment they converted to the wrong form of
Christianity.

In short, for the notion of “civilization,” in the sense used by
Huntington, to really make sense, civilizations have to be conceived
basically as traditions of people reading one another’s books. It is
possible to say Napoleon or Disraeli are more heirs to Plato and Thucydides
than a Greek shepherd of their day for one reason only: both men were more
likely to have read Plato and Thucydides. Western culture is not just a
collection of ideas; it is a collection of ideas that are taught in
textbooks and discussed in lecture halls, cafés, or literary salons. If it
were not, it would be hard to imagine how one could end up with a
civilization that begins in ancient Greece, passes to ancient Rome,
maintains a kind of half-life in the Medieval Catholic world, revives in
the Italian renaissance, and then passes mainly to dwell in those countries
bordering the North Atlantic. It would also be impossible to explain how,
for most of their history, “Western concepts” like human rights and
democracy existed only in potentia. We could say: this is a literary and
philosophical tradition, a set of ideas first imagined in ancient Greece,
then conveyed through books, lectures, and seminars over several thousand
years, drifting as they did westward, until their liberal and democratic
potential was fully realized in a small number of countries bordering the
Atlantic a century or two ago. Once they became enshrined in new,
democratic institutions, they began to worm their way into ordinary
citizens’ social and political common sense. Finally, their proponents
saw them as having universal status and tried to impose them on the rest of
the world. But here they hit their limits, because they cannot ultimately
expand to areas where there are equally powerful, rival textual
traditions—based in Koranic scholarship, or the teachings of the
Buddha—that inculcate other concepts and values.

This position, at least, would be intellectually consistent. One might call
it the Great Books theory of civilization. In a way, it’s quite
compelling. Being Western, one might say, has nothing to do with habitus.
It is not about the deeply embodied understandings of the world one absorbs
in childhood—that which makes certain people upper class Englishwomen,
others Bavarian farm boys, or Italian kids from Brooklyn. The West is,
rather, the literary-philosophical tradition into which all of them are
initiated, mainly in adolescence—though, certainly, some elements of that
tradition do, gradually, become part of everyone’s common sense. The
problem is that, if Huntington applied this model consistently, it would
destroy his argument. If civilizations are not deeply embodied, why, then,
should an upper class Peruvian woman or Bangladeshi farm boy not be able to
take the same curriculum and become just as Western as anyone else? But
this is precisely what Huntington is trying to deny.

As a result, he is forced to continually slip back and forth between the
two meanings of “civilization” and the two meanings of “culture.”
Mostly, the West is defined by its loftiest ideals. But sometimes it’s
defined by its ongoing institutional structure—for example, all those
early Medieval guilds and monastic orders, which do not seem to be inspired
by readings of Plato and Aristotle, but cropped up all of their own accord.
Sometimes Western individualism is treated as an abstract principle,
usually suppressed, an idea preserved in ancient texts, but occasionally
poking out its head in documents like the Magna Carta. Sometimes it is
treated as a deeply embedded folk understanding, which will never make
intuitive sense to those raised in a different cultural tradition.

Now, as I say, I chose Huntington largely because he’s such an easy
target. The argument in “The Clash of Civilizations” is unusually
sloppy.[213] Critics have duly savaged most of what he’s had to say about
non-Western civilizations. The reader may, at this point, feel justified to
wonder why I’m bothering to spend so much time on him. The reason is
that, in part because they are so clumsy, Huntington’s argument brings
out the incoherence in assumptions that are shared by almost everyone. None
of his critics, to my knowledge, have challenged the idea that there is an
entity that can be referred to as “the West,” that it can be treated
simultaneously as a literary tradition originating in ancient Greece, and
as the common sense culture of people who live in Western Europe and North
America today. The assumption that concepts like individualism and
democracy are somehow peculiar to it goes similarly unchallenged. All this
is simply taken for granted as the grounds of debate. Some proceed to
celebrate the West as the birthplace of freedom. Others denounce it as a
source of imperial violence. But it’s almost impossible to find a
political, or philosophical, or social thinker on the left or the right who
doubts one can say meaningful things about “the Western tradition” at
all. Many of the most radical, in fact, seem to feel it is impossible to
say meaningful things about anything else.[214]

Parenthetical Note: On the Slipperiness of the Western Eye

 
What I am suggesting is that the very notion of the West is founded on a
constant blurring of the line between textual traditions and forms of
everyday practice. To offer a particular vivid example: In the 1920s, a
French philosopher named Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote a series of books
proposing that many of the societies studied by anthropologists evinced a
“pre-logical mentality” (1926, etc.). Where modern Westerners employ
logico-experimental thought, he argued, primitives employ profoundly
different principles. The whole argument need not be spelled out.
Everything Lévy-Bruhl said about primitive logic was attacked almost
immediately and his argument is now considered entirely discredited. What
his critics did not, generally speaking, point out is that Lévy-Bruhl was
comparing apples and oranges. Basically, what he did was assemble the most
puzzling ritual statements or surprising reactions to unusual circumstances
he could cull from the observations of European missionaries and colonial
officials in Africa, New Guinea, and similar places, and try to extrapolate
the logic. He then compared this material, not with similar material
collected in France or some other Western country, but rather, with a
completely idealized conception of how Westerners ought to behave, based on
philosophical and scientific texts (buttressed, no doubt, by observations
about the way philosophers and other academics act while discussing and
arguing about such texts). The results are manifestly absurd—we all know
that ordinary people do not in fact apply Aristotelian syllogisms and
experimental methods to their daily affairs—but it is the special magic
of this style of writing is that one is never forced to confront this.

Because, in fact, this style of writing is also extremely common. How does
this magic work? Largely, by causing the reader to identify with a human
being of unspecified qualities who’s trying to solve a puzzle. One sees
it in the Western philosophical tradition, especially starting with the
works of Aristotle that, especially compared with similar works in other
philosophical traditions (which rarely start from such decontextualized
thinkers), give us the impression the universe was created yesterday,
suggesting no prior knowledge is necessary. Even more, there is the
tendency to show a commonsense narrator confronted with some kind of exotic
practices—this is what makes it possible, for example for a contemporary
German to read Tacitus’ Germania and automatically identify with the
perspective of the Italian narrator, rather than with his own
ancestor,[215] or an Italian atheist to read an Anglican missionary’s
account of some ritual in Zimbabwe without ever having to think about that
observer’s dedication to bizarre tea rituals or the doctrine of
transubstantiation. Hence, the entire history of the West can be framed as
a story of “inventions” and “discoveries.” Most of all, there is
the fact that it is precisely when one actually begins to write a text to
address these issues, as I am doing now, that one effectively becomes part
of the canon and the tradition most comes to seem overwhelmingly
inescapable.

More than anything else, the “Western individual” in Lévy-Bruhl, or
for that matter most contemporary anthropologists, is more than anything
else, precisely that featureless, rational observer, a disembodied eye,
carefully scrubbed of any individual or social content, that we are
supposed to pretend to be when writing in certain genres of prose. It has
little relation to any human being who has ever existed, grown up, had
loves and hatreds and commitments. It’s a pure abstraction. Recognizing
all of this creates a terrible problem for anthropologists: if the
“Western individual” doesn’t exist, then what precisely is our point
of comparison?

It seems to me, though, it creates an even worse problem for anyone who
wishes to see this figure as the bearer of “democracy,” as well. If
democracy is communal self-governance, the Western individual is an actor
already purged of any ties to a community. While it is possible to imagine
this relatively featureless, rational observer as the protagonist of
certain forms of market economics, to make him (and he is, unless otherwise
specified, presumed to be male) a democrat seems possible only if one
defines democracy as itself a kind of market that actors enter with little
more than a set of economic interests to pursue. This is, of course, the
approach promoted by rational-choice theory, and, in a way, you could say
it is already implicit in the predominant approach to democratic
decision-making in the literature since Rousseau, which tends to see
“deliberation” merely as the balancing of interests rather than a
process through which subjects themselves are constituted, or even shaped
(Manin 1994).[216] It is very difficult to see such an abstraction,
divorced from any concrete community, entering into the kind of
conversation and compromise required by anything but the most abstract form
of democratic process, such as the periodic participation in elections.

World-Systems Reconfigured

 
The reader may feel entitled to ask: If “the West” is a meaningless
category, how can we talk about such matters? It seems to me we need an
entirely new set of categories. While this is hardly the place to develop
them, I’ve suggested elsewhere (Graeber 2004) that there are a whole
series of terms—starting with the West, but also including terms like
“modernity”—that effectively substitute for thought. If one looks
either at concentrations of urbanism, or literary-philosophical traditions,
it becomes hard to avoid the impression that Eurasia was for most of its
history divided into three main centers: an Eastern system centered on
China, a South Asian one centered on what’s now India, and a Western
civilization that centered on what we now called “the Middle East,”
extending sometimes further, sometimes less, into the Mediterranean.[217]
In world-system terms, for most of the Middle Ages, Europe and Africa both
seem to have almost precisely the same relation with the core states of
Mesopotamia and the Levant: they were classic economic peripheries,
importing manufactures and supplying raw materials like gold and silver,
and, significantly, large numbers of slaves. (After the revolt of African
slaves in Basra from 868–883 CE, the Abbasid Caliphate seem to have began
importing Europeans instead, as they were considered more docile.) Europe
and Africa were, for most of this period, cultural peripheries as well.
Islam resembles what was later to be called “the Western tradition” in
so many ways—the intellectual efforts to fuze Judeo-Christian scripture
with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly
love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism,
missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism—even the
periodic waves of fascination with “Eastern mysticism”—that only the
deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the
conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition; that
Islamicization was and continues to be a form of Westernization; that those
who lived in the barbarian kingdoms of the European Middle Ages only came
to resemble what we now call “the West” when they themselves became
more like Islam.

If so, what we are used to calling “the rise of the West” is probably
better thought of, in world-system terms, as the emergence of what
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) has called the “North Atlantic system,”
which gradually replaced the Mediterranean semi-periphery, and emerged as a
world economy of its own, rivaling, and then gradually, slowly, painfully,
incorporating the older world economy that had centered on the cosmopolitan
societies of the Indian Ocean. This North Atlantic world-system was created
through almost unimaginable catastrophe: the destruction of entire
civilizations, mass enslavement, the death of at least a hundred million
human beings. It also produced its own forms of cosmopolitanism, with
endless fusions of African, Native American, and European traditions. Much
of the history of the seaborne, North Atlantic proletariat is only
beginning to be reconstructed (Gilroy 1993; Sakolsky & Koehnline 1993;
Rediker 1981, 1990; Linebaugh and Rediker 2001; etc.), a history of
mutinies, pirates, rebellions, defections, experimental communities, and
every sort of Antinomian and populist idea, largely squelched in
conventional accounts, much of it permanently lost, but which seems to have
played a key role in many of the radical ideas that came to be referred to
as “democracy.” This is jumping ahead. For now, I just want to
emphasize that rather than a history of “civilizations” developing
through some Herderian or Hegelian process of internal unfolding, we are
dealing with societies that are thoroughly entangled.

Part II: Democracy Was Not Invented

 
I began this essay by suggesting that one can write the history of
democracy in two very different ways. Either one can write a history of the
word “democracy,” beginning with ancient Athens, or one can write a
history of the sort of egalitarian decision-making procedures that in
Athens came to be referred to as “democratic.”

Normally, we tend to assume the two are effectively identical because
common wisdom has it that democracy—much like, say, science, or
philosophy—was invented in ancient Greece. On the face of it this seems
an odd assertion. Egalitarian communities have existed throughout human
history—many of them far more egalitarian than fifth-century Athens—and
they each had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions in matters of
collective importance. Often, this involved assembling everyone for
discussions in which all members of the community, at least in theory, had
equal say. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures could
not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.”

The main reason this argument seems to make intuitive sense is because in
these other assemblies, things rarely actually came to a vote. Almost
invariably, they used some form of consensus-finding. Now this is
interesting in itself. If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or
having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza
and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly
sophisticated ideas that some ancient genius had to “invent” them, then
why are they so rarely employed? Why, instead, did communities invariably
prefer the apparently much more difficult task of coming to unanimous
decisions?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a
face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community
want to do, than to figure out how to change the minds of those who don’t
want to do it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where
there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority
decision; either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive
force, or because the state has no interest in or does not tend to
intervene in local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who
find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last
thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which
someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to
guarantee the sort of humiliations, resentments, and hatreds that
ultimately lead the destruction of communities. As any activist who has
gone through a facilitation training for a contemporary direct action group
can tell you, consensus process is not the same as parliamentary debate and
finding consensus in no way resembles voting. Rather, we are dealing with a
process of compromise and synthesis meant to produce decisions that no one
finds so violently objectionable that they are not willing to at least
assent. That is to say two levels we are used to
distinguishing—decision-making, and enforcement—are effectively
collapsed here. It is not that everyone has to agree. Most forms of
consensus include a variety of graded forms of disagreement. The point is
to ensure that no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally
ignored and, therefore, that even those who think the group came to a bad
decision are willing to offer their passive acquiescence.

Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors
coincide:
 

a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and



a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.
 

 
For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at
the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually
considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of
coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they
were enforcing any sort of popular will.

It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most
competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to
make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or
tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely
surprising they made political decision-making into a public contest as
well. Even more crucial, though, was the fact that decisions were made by a
populace in arms. Aristotle, in his Politics, remarks that the constitution
of a Greek city-state will normally depend on the chief arm of its
military: if this is cavalry, it will be an aristocracy, since horses are
expensive. If hoplite infantry, it will be oligarchic, as all could not
afford the armor and training. If its power was based in the navy or light
infantry, one can expect a democracy, as anyone can row, or use a sling. In
other words, if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his
opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in
Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek
mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle
of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to
decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40,
everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things
actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.

In other words, here too decision-making and the means of enforcement were
effectively collapsed (or could be), but in a rather different way.

Roman legions could be similarly democratic; this was the main reason they
were never allowed to enter the city of Rome. And, when Machiavelli revived
the notion of a democratic republic at the dawn of the “modern” era, he
immediately reverted to the notion of a populace in arms.

This in turn might help explain the term “democracy” itself, which
appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist
opponents: it literally means the “force” or even “violence” of the
people. Kratos, not archos. The elitists who coined the term always
considered democracy not too far from simple rioting or mob rule; though,
of course, their solution was the permanent conquest of the people by
someone else. Ironically, when they did manage to suppress democracy for
this reason, which was usually, the result was that the only way the
general populace’s will was known was precisely through rioting, a
practice that became quite institutionalized in, say, imperial Rome or
eighteenth-century England.

One question that bears historical investigation is the degree to which
such phenomena were in fact encouraged by the state. Here, I’m not
referring to literal rioting, of course, but to what I would call the
“ugly mirrors”: institutions promoted or supported by elites that
reinforced the sense that popular decision-making could only be violent,
chaotic, and arbitrary “mob rule.” I suspect that these are quite
common to authoritarian regimes. Consider, for example, that while the
defining public event in democratic Athens was the agora, the defining
public event in authoritarian Rome was the circus, assemblies in which the
plebs gathered to witness races, gladiatorial contests, and mass
executions. Such games were sponsored either directly by the state, or more
often, by particular members of the elite (Veyne 1976; Kyle 1998; Lomar and
Cornell 2003). The fascinating thing about gladiatorial contests in
particular, is that they did involve a kind of popular decision-making:
lives would be taken, or spared, by popular acclaim. However, where the
procedures of the Athenian agora were designed to maximize the dignity of
the demos and the thoughtfulness of its deliberations—despite the
underlying element of coercion, and its occasional capability of making
terrifyingly bloodthirsty decisions—the Roman circus was almost exactly
the opposite. It had more the air of regular, state-sponsored lynchings.
Almost every quality normally ascribed to “the mob” by later writers
hostile to democracy—the capriciousness, overt cruelty, factionalism
(supporters of rival chariot teams would regularly do battle in the
streets), hero worship, mad passions—all were not only tolerated, but
actually encouraged, in the Roman amphitheater. It was as if an
authoritarian elite was trying to provide the public with constant
nightmare images of the chaos that would ensue if they were to take power
into their own hands.

My emphasis on the military origins of direct democracy is not meant to
imply that popular assemblies in, say, Medieval cities or New England town
meetings were not normally orderly and dignified procedures; though one
suspects this was in part due to the fact that here, too, in actual
practice, there was a certain baseline of consensus-seeking going on.
Still, they seem to have done little to disabuse members of political
elites of the idea that popular rule would more resemble the circuses and
riots of imperial Rome and Byzantium. The authors of the Federalist Papers,
like almost all other literate men of their day, took it for granted that
what they called “democracy”—by which they meant, direct democracy,
“pure democracy” as they sometimes put it—was in its nature the most
unstable, tumultuous form of government, not to mention one which endangers
the rights of minorities (the specific minority they had in mind in this
case being the rich). It was only once the term “democracy” could be
almost completely transformed to incorporate the principle of
representation—a term which itself has a very curious history, since as
Cornelius Castoriadis liked to point out (1991; Godbout 2005), it
originally referred to representatives of the people before the king,
internal ambassadors in fact, rather than those who wielded power in any
sense themselves—that it was rehabilitated, in the eyes of well-born
political theorists, and took on the meaning it has today. In the next
section let me pass, however briefly, to how this came about.

Part III: On the Emergence of the “Democratic Ideal”

 
The remarkable thing is just how long it took. For the first three hundred
years of the North Atlantic system, democracy continued to mean “the
mob.” This was true even in the “Age of Revolutions.” In almost every
case, the founders of what are now considered the first democratic
constitutions in England, France, and the United States, rejected any
suggestion that they were trying to introduce “democracy.” As Francis
Dupuis-Deri (1999, 2004) has observed:
 

 
The founders of the modern electoral systems in the United States and
France were overtly anti-democratic. This anti-democratism can be explained
in part by their vast knowledge of the literary, philosophical and
historical texts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Regarding political history, it
was common for American and French political figures to see themselves as
direct heirs to classical civilization and to believe that all through
history, from Athens and Rome to Boston and Paris, the same political
forces have faced off in eternal struggles. The founders sided with the
historical republican forces against the aristocratic and democratic ones,
and the Roman republic was the political model for both the Americans and
the French, whereas Athenian democracy was a despised counter-model
(Dupuis-Deri 2004: 120).
 

 
In the English-speaking world, for example, most educated people in the
late eighteenth century were familiar with Athenian democracy largely
through a translation of Thucydides by Thomas Hobbes. Their conclusion,
that democracy was unstable, tumultuous, prone to factionalism and
demagogery, and marked by a strong tendency to turn into despotism, was
hardly surprising.

Most politicians, then, were hostile to anything that smacked of democracy
precisely because they saw themselves as heirs to what we now call “the
Western tradition.” The ideal of the Roman republic was enshrined, for
example, in the American constitution, whose framers were quite consciously
trying to imitate Rome’s “mixed constitution,” balancing monarchical,
aristocratic, and democratic elements. John Adams, for example, in his
Defense of the Constitution (1797) argued that truly egalitarian societies
do not exist; that every known human society has a supreme leader, an
aristocracy (whether of wealth or a “natural aristocracy” of virtue)
and a public, and that the Roman Constitution was the most perfect in
balancing the powers of each. The American constitution was meant to
reproduce this balance by creating a powerful presidency, a senate to
represent the wealthy, and a congress to represent the people—though the
powers of the latter were largely limited to ensuring popular control over
the distribution of tax money. This republican ideal lies at the basis of
all “democratic” constitutions and to this day many conservative
thinkers in America like to point out that “America is not a democracy:
it’s a republic.”

On the other hand, as John Markoff notes, “those who called themselves
democrats at the tail end of the eighteenth century were likely to be very
suspicious of parliaments, downright hostile to competitive political
parties, critical of secret ballots, uninterested or even opposed to
women’s suffrage, and sometimes tolerant of slavery” (1999:
661)—again, hardly surprising, for those who wished to revive something
along the lines of ancient Athens.

At the time, outright democrats of this sort—men like Tom Paine, for
instance—were considered a tiny minority of rabble-rousers even within
revolutionary regimes. Things only began to change over the course of the
next century. In the United States, as the franchise widened in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, and politicians were increasingly forced
to seek the votes of small farmers and urban laborers, some began to adopt
the term. Andrew Jackson led the way. He started referring to himself as a
democrat in the 1820s. Within twenty years, almost all political parties,
not just populists but even the most conservative, began to follow suit. In
France, socialists began calling for “democracy” in the 1830s, with
similar results: within ten or fifteen years, the term was being used by
even moderate and conservative republicans forced to compete with them for
the popular vote (Dupuis-Deris 1999, 2004). The same period saw a dramatic
reappraisal of Athens, which—again starting in the 1820s—began to be
represented as embodying a noble ideal of public participation, rather than
a nightmare of violent crowd psychology (Saxonhouse 1993). This is not,
however, because anyone, at this point, was endorsing Athenian-style direct
democracy, even on the local level (in fact, one rather imagines it was
precisely this fact that made the rehabilitation of Athens possible). For
the most part, politicians simply began substituting the word
“democracy” for “republic,” without any change in meaning. I
suspect the new positive appraisal of Athens had more to do with popular
fascination with events in Greece at the time than anything else:
specifically, the war of independence against the Ottoman Empire between
1821 and 1829. It was hard not see it as modern replay of the clash between
the Persian Empire and Greek city-states narrated by Herodotus, a kind of
founding text of the opposition between freedom-loving Europe and the
despotic East; and, of course, changing one’s frame of reference from
Thucydides to Herodotus could only do Athens’ image good.

When novelists like Victor Hugo and poets like Walt Whitman began touting
democracy as a beautiful ideal—as they soon began to do—they were not,
however, referring to word-games on the part of elites, but to the broader
popular sentiment that had caused small farmers and urban laborers to look
with favor on the term to begin with, even when the political elite was
still largely using it as a term of abuse. The “democratic ideal,” in
other words, did not emerge from the Western literary-philosophical
tradition. It was, rather, imposed on it. In fact, the notion that
democracy was a distinctly “Western” ideal only came much later. For
most of the nineteenth century, when Europeans defined themselves against
“the East” or “the Orient,” they did so precisely as
“Europeans,” not “Westerners.”[218] With few exceptions, “the
West” referred to the Americas. It was only in the 1890s, when Europeans
began to see the United States as part of the same, coequal civilization,
that many started using the term in its current sense (GoGwilt 1995; Martin
& Wigan 1997: 49–62). Huntington’s “Western civilization” comes
even later: this notion was first developed in American universities in the
years following World War I (Federici 1995: 67), at a time when German
intellectuals were already locked in debate about whether they were part of
the West at all. Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of
“Western civilization” proved perfectly tailored for an age that saw
the gradual dissolution of colonial empires, since it managed to lump
together the former colonial metropoles with their wealthiest and most
powerful settler colonies, at the same time insisting on their shared moral
and intellectual superiority, and abandoning any notion that they
necessarily had a responsibility to “civilize” anybody else. The
peculiar tension evident in phrases like “Western science,” “Western
freedoms,” or “Western consumer goods”—do these reflect universal
truths that all human beings should recognize? or are they the products of
one tradition among many?—would appear to stem directly from the
ambiguities of the historical moment. The resulting formulation is, as
I’ve noted, so riddled with contradictions that it’s hard to see how it
could have arisen except to fill a very particular historical need.

If you examine these terms more closely, however, it becomes obvious that
all these “Western” objects are the products of endless entanglements.
“Western science” was patched together out of discoveries made on many
continents, and is now largely produced by non-Westerners. “Western
consumer goods” were always drawn from materials taken from all over the
world, many explicitly imitated Asian products, and nowadays, are all
produced in China. Can we say the same of “Western freedoms”?

The reader can probably guess what my answer will be.

Part IV: Recuperation

 
In debates about the origins of capitalism, one of the main bones of
contention is whether capitalism—or, alternately, industrial
capitalism—emerged primarily within European societies, or whether it can
only be understood in the context of a larger world-system connecting
Europe and its overseas possessions, markets and sources of labor overseas.
It is possible to have the argument, I think, because so many capitalist
forms began so early—many could be said to already be present, at least
in embryonic form, at the very dawn of European expansion. This can hardly
be said for democracy. Even if one is willing to follow by-now accepted
convention and identify republican forms of government with that word,
democracy only emerges within centers of empire like England and France,
and colonies like the United States, after the Atlantic system had existed
for almost three hundred years.

Giovanni Arrighi, Iftikhar Ahmad, and Min-wen Shih (1997) have produced
what’s to my mind one of the more interesting responses to Huntington: a
world-systemic analysis of European expansion, particularly in Asia, over
the last several centuries. One of the most fascinating elements in their
account is how, at exactly the same time as European powers came to start
thinking themselves as “democratic”—in the 1830s, 1840s, and
1850s—those same powers began pursuing an intentional policy of
supporting reactionary elites against those pushing for anything remotely
resembling democratic reforms overseas. Great Britain was particularly
flagrant in this regard: whether in its support for the Ottoman Empire
against the rebellion of Egyptian governor Muhammed Ali after the Balta
Limani Treaty of 1838, or in its support for the Qing imperial forces
against the Taiping rebellion after the Nanjing Treaty of 1842. In either
case, Britain first found some excuse to launch a military attack on one of
the great Asian ancien regimes, defeated it militarily, imposed a
commercially advantageous treaty, and then, almost immediately upon doing
so, swung around to prop that same regime up against political rebels who
clearly were closer to their own supposed “Western” values than the
regime itself: in the first case a rebellion aiming to turn Egypt into
something more like a modern nation-state, in the second, an egalitarian
Christian movement calling for universal brotherhood. After the Great
Rebellion of 1857 in India, Britain began employing the same strategy in
her own colonies, self-consciously propping up “landed magnates and the
petty rulers of ‘native states’ within its own Indian empire” (1997:
34). All of this was buttressed on the intellectual level by the
development around the same time of Orientalist theories that argued that,
in Asia, such authoritarian regimes were inevitable, and democratizing
movements were unnatural or did not exist.[219]

In sum, Huntington’s claim that Western civilization is the bearer of a
heritage of liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty,
the rule of law, democracy, free markets, and other similarly attractive
ideals—all of which are said to have permeated other civilizations only
superficially—rings false to anyone familiar with the Western record in
Asia in the so-called age of nation-states. In this long list of ideals, it
is hard to find a single one that was not denied in part or full by the
leading Western powers of the epoch in their dealings either with the
peoples they subjected to direct colonial rule or with the governments over
which they sought to establish suzerainty. And conversely, it is just as
hard to find a single one of those ideals that was not upheld by movements
of national liberation in their struggle against the Western powers. In
upholding these ideals, however, non-Western peoples and governments
invariably combined them with ideals derived from their own civilizations
in those spheres in which they had little to learn from the West (Arrighi,
Ahmad, and Shih 1997: 25).

Actually, I think one could go much further. Opposition to European
expansion in much of the world, even quite early on, appears to have been
carried out in the name of “Western values” that the Europeans in
question did not yet even have. Engseng Ho (2004: 222–24) for example
draws our attention to the first known articulation of the notion of jihad
against Europeans in the Indian Ocean: a book called Gift of the Jihad
Warriors in Matters Regarding the Portuguese, written in 1574 by an Arab
jurist named Zayn al-Din al Malibari and addressed to the Muslim sultan of
the Deccan state of Bijapur. In it, the author makes a case that it is
justified to wage war again the Portuguese specifically because they
destroyed a tolerant, pluralistic society in which Muslims, Hindus,
Christians, and Jews had always managed to coexist.

In the Muslim trading ecumene of the Indian Ocean, some of Huntington’s
values—a certain notion of liberty, a certain notion of equality, some
very explicit ideas about freedom of trade and the rule of law—had long
been considered important; others, such as religious tolerance, might well
have become values as a result of Europeans coming onto the scene—if only
by point of contrast. My real point is that one simply cannot lay any of
these values down to the one particular moral, intellectual, or cultural
tradition. They arise, for better or worse, from exactly this sort of
interaction.

I also want to make another point, though. We are dealing with the work of
a Muslim jurist, writing a book addressed to a South Indian king. The
values of tolerance and mutual accommodation he wishes to
defend—actually, these are our terms; he himself speaks of
“kindness”—might have emerged from a complex intercultural space,
outside the authority of any overarching state power, and they might have
only crystallized, as values, in the face of those who wished to destroy
that space. Yet, in order to write about them, to justify their defense, he
was forced to deal with states and frame his argument in terms of a single
literary-philosophical tradition: in this case, the legal tradition of
Sunni Islam. There was an act of reincorporation. There inevitably must be,
once one reenters the world of state power and textual authority. And, when
later authors write about such ideas, they tend to represent matters as if
the ideals emerged from that tradition, rather than from the spaces in
between

So do historians. In a way, it’s almost inevitable that they should do
so, considering the nature of their source material. They are, after all,
primarily students of textual traditions, and information about the spaces
in between is often very difficult to come by. What’s more, they are—at
least when dealing with the “Western tradition”—writing, in large
part, within the same literary tradition as their sources. This is what
makes the real origins of democratic ideals—especially that popular
enthusiasm for ideas of liberty and popular sovereignty that obliged
politicians to adopt the term to begin with—so difficult to reconstruct.
Recall here what I said earlier about the “slipperiness of the Western
eye.” The tradition has long had a tendency to describe alien societies
as puzzles to be deciphered by a rational observer. As a result,
descriptions of alien societies were often used, around this time, as a way
of making a political point: whether contrasting European societies with
the relative freedom of Native Americans, or the relative order of China.
But they did not tend to acknowledge the degree to which they were
themselves entangled with those societies and to which their own
institutions were influenced by them. In fact, as any student of early
anthropology knows, even authors who were themselves part Native American
or part Chinese, or who had never set foot in Europe, would tend to write
this way. As men or women of action, they would negotiate their way between
worlds. When it came time to write about their experiences, they would
become featureless abstractions. When it came time to write institutional
histories, they referred back, almost invariably, to the Classical world.

The “Influence Debate”

 
In 1977, an historian of the Iroquois confederacy (himself a Native
American and member of AIM, the American Indian Movement) wrote an essay
proposing that certain elements of the US constitution—particularly its
federal structure—were inspired in part by the League of Six Nations. He
expanded on the argument in the 1980s with another historian, David
Johansen (1982; Grinde and Johansen 1990), suggesting that, in a larger
sense, what we now would consider America’s democratic spirit was partly
inspired by the example of Native Americans.

Some of the specific evidence they assembled was quite compelling. The idea
of forming some sort of federation of colonies was indeed proposed by an
Onondaga ambassador named Canassatego, exhausted by having to negotiate
with so many separate colonies during negotiations over the Lancaster
Treaty in 1744. The image he used to demonstrate the strength of union, a
bundle of six arrows, still appears on the Seal of the Union of the United
States (the number later increased to thirteen). Ben Franklin, present at
the event, took up the idea and promoted it widely through his printing
house over the next decade, and, in 1754, his efforts came to fruition with
a conference in Albany, New York—with representatives of the Six Nations
in attendance—that drew up what came to be known as the Albany Plan of
Union. The plan was ultimately rejected both by British authorities and
colonial parliaments, but it was clearly an important first step. More
importantly, perhaps, proponents of what has come to be called the
“influence theory” argued that the values of egalitarianism and
personal freedom that marked so many Eastern Woodlands societies served as
a broader inspiration for the equality and liberty promoted by colonial
rebels. When Boston patriots triggered their revolution by dressing up as
Mohawks and dumping British tea into the harbor, they were making a
self-conscious statement of their model for individual liberty.

That Iroquois federal institutions might have had some influence on the US
constitution was considered a completely unremarkable notion, when it was
occasionally proposed in the nineteenth century. When it was proposed again
in the 1980s it set off a political maelstrom. Many Native Americans
strongly endorsed the idea, Congress passed a bill acknowledging it, and
all sorts of right-wing commentators immediately pounced on it as an
example of the worst sort of political correctness. At the same time,
though, the argument met immediate and quite virulent opposition both from
most professional historians considered authorities on the constitution and
from anthropological experts on the Iroquois.

The actual debate ended up turning almost entirely on whether one could
prove a direct relation between Iroquois institutions and the thinking of
the framers of the constitution. Payne (1999), for example, noted that some
New England colonists were discussing federal schemes before they were even
aware of the League’s existence; in a larger sense, they argued that
proponents of the “influence theory” had essentially cooked the books
by picking out every existing passage in the writings of colonial
politicians that praised Iroquoian institutions, while ignoring hundreds of
texts in which those same politicians denounced the Iroquois, and Indians
in general, as ignorant murdering savages. Their opponents, they said, left
the reader with the impression that explicit, textual proof of an Iroquoian
influence on the constitution existed, and this was simply not the case.
Even the Indians present at constitutional conventions appear to have been
there to state grievances, not to offer advice. Invariably, when colonial
politicians discussed the origins of their ideas, they looked to Classical,
Biblical, or European examples: the book of Judges, the Achaean League, the
Swiss Confederacy, the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Proponents of
the influence theory, in turn, replied that this kind of linear thinking
was simplistic: no one was claiming the Six Nations were the only or even
primary model for American federalism, just one of many elements that went
into the mix—and considering that it was the only functioning example of
a federal system of which the colonists had any direct experience, to
insist it had no influence whatever was simply bizarre. Indeed, some of the
objections raised by anthropologists seem so odd—for example, Elisabeth
Tooker’s objection (1998) that, since the League worked by consensus and
reserved an important place for women, and the US constitution used a
majority system and only allowed men to vote, one could not possibly have
served as inspiration for the other, or Dean Snow’s remark (1994: 154)
that such claims “muddle and denigrate the subtle and remarkable features
of Iroquois government”—one can only conclude that Native American
activist Vine Deloria probably did have a point in suggesting much of this
was simply an effort by scholars to protect what they considered their
turf—a matter of intellectual property rights (in Johansen 1998: 82).

The proprietary reaction is much clearer in some quarters. “This myth
isn’t just silly, it’s destructive,” wrote one contributor to The New
Republic. “Obviously Western civilization, beginning in Greece, had
provided models of government much closer to the hearts of the Founding
Fathers than this one. There was nothing to be gained by looking to the New
World for inspiration” (Newman 1998: 18). If one is speaking of the
immediate perceptions of many of the United States’ “founding
fathers,” this may well be true, but if we are trying to understand the
Iroquois influence on American democracy, then matters look quite
different. As we’ve seen, the Constitution’s framers did indeed
identify with the classical tradition, but they were hostile to democracy
for that very reason. They identified democracy with untrammeled liberty,
equality, and, insofar as they were aware of Indian customs at all, they
were likely to see them as objectionable for precisely the same reasons.

If one reexamines some of the mooted passages, this is precisely what one
finds. John Adams, remember, had argued in his Defense of the Constitution
that egalitarian societies do not exist; political power in every human
society is divided between the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic
principles. He saw the Indians as resembling the ancient Germans in that
“the democratical branch, in particular, is so determined, that real
sovereignty resided in the body of the people,” which, he said, worked
well enough when one was dealing with populations scattered over a wide
territory with no real concentrations of wealth, but, as the Goths found
when they conquered the Roman empire, could only lead to confusion,
instability, and strife as soon as such populations became more settled and
have significant resources to administer (Adams: 296; see Levy 1999: 598;
Payne 1999: 618). His observations are typical. Madison, even Jefferson,
tended to describe Indians much as did John Locke, as exemplars of an
individual liberty untrammeled by any form of state or systematic
coercion—a condition made possible by the fact that Indian societies were
not marked by significant divisions of property. They considered Native
institutions obviously inappropriate for a society such as their own, which
did.

Still, Enlightenment theory to the contrary, nations are not really created
by the acts of wise lawgivers. Neither is democracy invented in texts; even
if we are forced to rely on texts to divine its history. Actually, the men
who wrote the Constitution were not only for the most part wealthy
landowners, few had a great deal of experience in sitting down with a group
of equals—at least, until they became involved in colonial congresses.
Democratic practices tend to first get hammered out in places far from the
purview of such men, and, if one sets out in search for which of their
contemporaries had the most hands-on experience in such matters, the
results are sometimes startling. One of the leading contemporary historians
of European democracy, John Markoff, in an essay called “Where and When
Was Democracy Invented?,” remarks, at one point, very much in passing:
 

 
that leadership could derive from the consent of the led, rather than be
bestowed by higher authority, would have been a likely experience of the
crews of pirate vessels in the early modern Atlantic world. Pirate crews
not only elected their captains, but were familiar with countervailing
power (in the forms of the quartermaster and ship’s council) and
contractual relations of individual and collectivity (in the form of
written ship’s articles specifying shares of booty and rates of
compensation for on-the-job injury) (Markoff 1999: 673n62).
 

 
As a matter of fact, the typical organization of eighteenth-century pirate
ships, as reconstructed by historians like Marcus Rediker (2004: 60–82),
appears to have been remarkably democratic. Captains were not only elected,
they usually functioned much like Native American war chiefs: granted total
power during chase or combat, they were otherwise were treated like
ordinary crewmen. Those ships whose captains were granted more general
powers also insisted on the crew’s right to remove them at any time for
cowardice, cruelty, or any other reason. In every case, ultimate power
rested in a general assembly that often ruled on even the most minor
matters, always, apparently, by majority show of hands.

All this might seem less surprising if one considers the pirates’
origins. Pirates were generally mutineers, sailors often originally pressed
into service against their will in port towns across the Atlantic, who had
mutinied against tyrannical captains and “declared war against the whole
world.” They often became classic social bandits, wreaking vengeance
against captains who abused their crews, and releasing or even rewarding
those against whom they found no complaints. The make-up of crews was often
extraordinarily heterogeneous. “Black Sam Bellamy’s crew of 1717 was
‘a Mix’d Multitude of all Country’s,’ including British, French,
Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Native American, African American, and two dozen
Africans who had been liberated from a slave ship” (Rediker 2004: 53). In
other words, we are dealing with a collection of people in which there was
likely to be at least some first-hand knowledge of a very wide range of
directly democratic institutions, ranging from Swedish tings to African
village assemblies to Native American councils such as those from which the
League of Six Nations itself developed, suddenly finding themselves forced
to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any
state. It was the perfect intercultural space of experiment. In fact, there
was likely to be no more conducive ground for the development of new
democratic institutions anywhere in the Atlantic world at the time.

I bring this up for two reasons. One is obvious. We have no evidence that
democratic practices developed on Atlantic pirate ships in the early part
of the eighteenth century had any influence, direct or indirect, on the
evolution of democratic constitutions sixty or seventy years later. Nor
could we. While accounts of pirates and their adventures circulated widely,
having much the same popular appeal as they do today (and presumably, at
the time, were likely to be at least a little more accurate than
contemporary Hollywood versions), this would be about the very last
influence a French, English, or colonial gentleman would ever have been
willing to acknowledge. This is not to say that pirate practices were
likely to have influenced democratic constitutions. Only that we would not
know if they did. One can hardly imagine things would be too different with
those they ordinarily referred to as “the American savages.”

The other reason is that frontier societies in the Americas were probably
more similar to pirate ships than we would be given to imagine. They might
not have been as densely populated as pirate ships, or in as immediate need
of constant cooperation, but they were spaces of intercultural
improvization, largely outside of the purview of states. Colin Calloway
(1997; cf. Axtell 1985) has documented just how entangled the societies of
settlers and natives often were, with settlers adopting Indian crops,
clothes, medicines, customs, and styles of warfare; trading with them,
often living side by side, sometimes intermarrying, and most of all,
inspiring endless fears among the leaders of colonial communities and
military units that their subordinates were absorbing Indian attitudes of
equality and individual liberty. At the same time, as New England Puritan
minister Cotton Mather, for example, was inveighing against pirates as a
blaspheming scourge of mankind, he was also complaining that fellow
colonists had begun to imitate Indian customs of child-rearing (for
example, by abandoning corporal punishment), and increasingly forgetting
the principles of proper discipline and “severity” in the governance of
families for the “foolish indulgence” typical of Indians, whether in
relations between masters and servants, men and women, or young and old
(Calloway 1997: 192).[220] This was true most of all in communities, often
made up of escaped slaves and servants who “became Indians,” outside
the control of colonial governments entirely (Sakolsky & Koehnline 1993),
or island enclaves of what Linebaugh and Rediker (1991) have called “the
Atlantic proletariat,” the motley collection of freedmen, sailors, ships
whores, renegades, Antinomians, and rebels that developed in the port
cities of the North Atlantic world before the emergence of modern racism,
and from whom much of the democratic impulse of the American—and
other—revolutions seems to have first emerged. But it was true for
ordinary settlers as well. The irony is that this was the real argument of
Bruce Johansen’s book Forgotten Founders (1982), which first kicked off
the “influence debate”—an argument that largely ended up getting lost
in all the sound and fury about the constitution: that ordinary Englishmen
and Frenchmen settled in the colonies only began to think of themselves as
“Americans,” as a new sort of freedom-loving people, when they began to
see themselves as more like Indians. And that this sense was inspired not
primarily by the sort of romanticization at a distance one might encounter
in texts by Jefferson or Adam Smith, but rather, by the actual experience
of living in frontier societies that were essentially, as Calloway puts it,
“amalgams.” The colonists who came to America, in fact, found
themselves in a unique situation: having largely fled the hierarchy and
conformism of Europe, they found themselves confronted with an indigenous
population far more dedicated to principles of equality and individualism
than they had hitherto been able to imagine; and then proceeded to largely
exterminate them, even while adopting many of their customs, habits, and
attitudes.

I might add that during this period the Five Nations were something of an
amalgam as well. Originally a collection of groups that had made a kind of
contractual agreement with one another to create a way of mediating
disputes and making peace, they became, during their period of expansion in
the seventeenth century, an extraordinary jumble of peoples, with large
proportions of the population war captives adopted into Iroquois families
to replace family members who were dead. Missionaries in those days often
complained that it was difficult to preach to Seneca in their own
languages, because a majority were not completely fluent in it (Quain
1937). Even during the eighteenth century, for instance, while Canassatoga
was an Onondaga sachem, the other main negotiator with the colonists,
Swatane (called Schickallemy) was actually French—or, at least, born to
French parents in what’s now Canada. On all sides, then, borders were
blurred. We are dealing with a graded succession of spaces of democratic
improvization, from the Puritan communities of New England with their town
councils, to frontier communities, to the Iroquois themselves.

Traditions as Acts of Endless Refoundation

Let me try to pull some of the pieces together now.

Throughout this essay, I’ve been arguing that democratic practice,
whether defined as procedures of egalitarian decision-making, or government
by public discussion, tends to emerge from situations in which communities
of one sort or another manage their own affairs outside the purview of the
state. The absence of state power means the absence of any systematic
mechanism of coercion to enforce decisions; this tends to result either in
some form of consensus process, or, in the case of essentially military
formations like Greek hoplites or pirate ships, sometimes a system of
majority voting (since, in such cases, the results, if it did come down to
a contest of force, are readily apparent). Democratic innovation, and the
emergence of what might be called democratic values, has a tendency to
spring from what I’ve called zones of cultural improvization, usually
also outside of the control of states, in which diverse sorts of people
with different traditions and experiences are obliged to figure out some
way to deal with one another. Frontier communities whether in Madagascar or
Medieval Iceland, pirate ships, Indian Ocean trading communities, Native
American confederations on the edge of European expansion, are all examples
here.

All of this has very little to do with the great literary-philosophical
traditions that tend to be seen as the pillars of great civilizations:
indeed, with few exceptions, those traditions are overall explicitly
hostile to democratic procedures and the sort of people that employ
them.[221] Governing elites, in turn, have tended either to ignore these
forms, or to try to stomp them out.[222]

At a certain point in time, however, first in the core states of the
Atlantic system—notably England and France, the two that had the largest
colonies in North America—this began to change. The creation of that
system had been heralded by such unprecedented destruction that it allowed
endless new improvizational spaces for the emerging “Atlantic
proletariat.” States, under pressure from social movements, began to
institute reforms; eventually, those working in the elite literary
tradition started seeking precedents for them. The result was the creation
of representative systems modeled on the Roman Republic that then were
later redubbed, under popular pressure, “democracies” and traced to
Athens.

Actually, I would suggest that this process of democratic recuperation and
refoundation was typical of a broader process that probably marks any
civilizational tradition, but was at that time entering a phase of critical
intensity. As European states expanded and the Atlantic system came to
encompass the world, all sorts of global influences appear to have
coalesced in European capitals, and to have been reabsorbed within the
tradition that eventually came to be known as “Western.” The actual
genealogy of the elements that came together in the modern state, for
example, is probably impossible to reconstruct—if only because the very
process of recuperation tends to scrub away the more exotic elements in
written accounts, or, if not, integrate them into familiar topoi of
invention and discovery. Historians, who tend to rely almost exclusively on
texts and pride themselves on exacting standards of evidence, therefore,
often end up, as they did with the Iroquois influence theory, feeling it is
their professional responsibility to act as if new ideas do emerge from
within textual traditions. Let me throw out two examples:

African fetishism and the idea of the social contract. The Atlantic system,
of course, began to take form in West Africa even before Columbus sailed to
America. In a fascinating series of essays, William Pietz (1985, 1987,
1988) has described the life of the resulting coastal enclaves where
Venetian, Dutch, Portuguese, and every other variety of European merchant
and adventurer cohabited with African merchants and adventurers speaking
dozens of different languages, a mix of Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and a
variety of ancestral religions. Trade, within these enclaves, was regulated
by objects the Europeans came to refer to as “fetishes,” and Pietz does
much to elaborate the European merchants’ theories of value and
materiality to which this notion ultimately gave rise. More interesting,
perhaps, is the African perspective. Insofar as it can be reconstructed, it
appears strikingly similar to the kind of social contract theories
developed by men like Thomas Hobbes in Europe at the same time (MacGaffey
1994; Graeber 2005). Essentially, fetishes were created by a series of
contracting parties who wished to enter into ongoing economic relations
with one another, and were accompanied by agreements on property rights and
the rules of exchange; those violating them were to be destroyed by the
objects’ power. In other words, just as in Hobbes, social relations are
created when a group of men agreed to create a sovereign power to threaten
them with violence if they failed to respect their property rights and
contractual obligations. Later, African texts even praised the fetish as
preventing a war of all against all. Unfortunately, it’s completely
impossible to find evidence that Hobbes was aware of any of this: he lived
most of his life in a port town and very likely had met traders familiar
with such customs; but his political works contain no references to the
African continent whatever.

China and the European nation-state. Over the course of the early Modern
period, European elites gradually conceived the ideal of governments that
ruled over uniform populations, speaking the same language, under a uniform
system of law and administration; and eventually that this system also
should be administered by a meritocratic elite whose training should
consist largely in the study of literary classics in that nation’s
vernacular language. The odd thing is nothing approaching a precedent for a
state of this sort existed anywhere in previous European history, though it
almost exactly corresponded to the system Europeans believed to hold sway
(and which to a large extent, did hold sway) in Imperial China.[223] Is
there evidence for a Chinese “influence theory?” In this case, there is
a little. The prestige of the Chinese government evidently being higher, in
the eyes of European philosophers, than African merchants, such influences
would not be entirely ignored. From Leibniz’s famous remark that the
Chinese should really be sending missionaries to Europe rather than the
other way around, to the work of Montesquieu and Voltaire, one sees a
succession of political philosophers extolling Chinese institutions—as
well as a popular fascination with Chinese art, gardens, fashions, and
moral philosophy (Lovejoy 1955)—at exactly the time that Absolutism took
form; only to fade away in the nineteenth century once China had become the
object of European imperial expansion. Obviously none of this constitutes
proof that the modern nation-state is in any way of Chinese inspiration.
But considering the nature of the literary traditions we’re dealing with,
even if it were true, this would be about as much proof as we could ever
expect to get.

So, is the modern nation-state really a Chinese model of administration,
adopted to channel and control democratic impulses derived largely from the
influence of Native American societies and the pressures of the Atlantic
proletariat, that ultimately came to be justified by a social contract
theory derived from Africa? Probably not. At least, this would no doubt be
wildly overstating things. But neither do I think it a coincidence either
that democratic ideals of statecraft first emerged during a period in which
the Atlantic powers were at the center of vast global empires, and an
endless confluence of knowledge and influences, or that they eventually
developed the theory that those ideals sprang instead exclusively from
their own “Western” civilization—despite the fact that, during the
period in which Europeans had not been at the center of global empires,
they had developed nothing of the kind.

Finally, I think it’s important to emphasize that this process of
recuperation is by no means limited to Europe. In fact, one of the striking
things is how quickly almost everyone else in the world began playing the
same game. To some degree, as the example of al Malibari suggests, it was
probably happening in other parts of the world even before it began
happening in Europe. Of course, overseas movements only started using the
word “democracy” much later—but even in the Atlantic world, that term
only came into common usage around the middle of the nineteenth century. It
was also around the middle of the nineteenth century—just as European
powers began recuperating notions of democracy for their own
tradition—when Britain led the way in a very self-conscious policy of
suppressing anything that looked like it might even have the potential to
become a democratic, popular movement overseas. The ultimate response, in
much of the colonial world, was to begin playing the exact same game.
Opponents to colonial rule scoured their own literary-philosophical
traditions for parallels to ancient Athens, along with examining
traditional communal decision-making forms in their hinterlands. As Steve
Muhlenberger and Phil Payne (1993; Baechler 1985), for example, have
documented, if one simply defines it as decision-making by public
discussion, “democracy” is a fairly common phenomenon; examples can be
found even under states and empires, if only, usually, in those places or
domains of human activity in which the rulers of states and empires took
little interest. Greek historians writing about India, for example,
witnessed any number of polities they considered worthy of the name.
Between 1911 and 1918, a number of Indian historians (K.P. Jayaswal, D.R.
Bhandarkar, R.C. Majumdar)[224] began examining some of these sources, not
only Greek accounts of Alexander’s campaigns but also early Buddhist
documents in Pali and early Hindu vocabularies and works of political
theory. They discovered dozens of local equivalents to fifth-century Athens
on South Asian soil: cities and political confederations in which all men
formally classified as a warriors—which in some cases meant a very large
proportion of adult males—were expected to make important decisions
collectively, through public deliberation in communal assemblies. The
literary sources of the time were mostly just as hostile to popular rule as
Greek ones,[225] but, at least until around 400 AD, such polities
definitely existed, and the deliberative mechanisms they employed continue
to be employed, in everything from the governance of Buddhist monasteries
to craft guilds, until the present day. It was possible, then, to say that
the Indian, or even Hindu, tradition was always inherently democratic; and
this became a strong argument for those seeking independence.

These early historians clearly overstated their case. After independence
came the inevitable backlash. Historians began to point out that these
“clan republics” were very limited democracies at best, that the
overwhelming majority of the population—women, slaves, those defined as
outsiders—were completely disenfranchized. Of course, all this was true
of Athens as well, and historians have pointed that out at length. But it
seems to me questions of authenticity are of at best secondary importance.
Such traditions are always largely fabrications. To some degree, that’s
what traditions are: the continual process of their own fabrication. The
point is that, in every case, what we have are political elites—or
would-be political elites—identifying with a tradition of democracy in
order to validate essentially republican forms of government. Also, not
only was democracy not the special invention of “the West,” neither was
this process of recuperation and refoundation. True, elites in India
started playing the game some sixty years later than those in England and
France, but, historically, this is not a particularly long period of time.
Rather than seeing Indian, or Malagasy, or Tswana, or Maya claims to being
part of an inherently democratic tradition as an attempt to ape the West,
it seems to me we are looking at different aspects of the same planetary
process: a crystallization of longstanding democratic practices in the
formation of a global system, in which ideas were flying back and forth in
all directions, and the gradual, usually grudging adoption of some by
ruling elites.

The temptation to trace democracy to some particular cultural
“origins,” though, seems almost irresistible. Even serious scholars
continue to indulge it. Let me return to Harvard to provide one final, to
my mind particularly ironic, example: a collection of essays called The
Breakout: The Origins of Civilization (M. Lamberg-Karlovsky 2000), put
together by leading American symbolic archaeologists.[226] The line of
argument sets out from a suggestion by archaeologist K.C. Chang, that early
Chinese civilization was based on a fundamentally different sort of
ideology than Egypt or Mesopotamia. It was essentially a continuation of
the cosmos of earlier hunting societies, in which the monarch replaced the
shaman as having an exclusive and personal connection with divine powers.
The result was absolute authority. Chang was fascinated by the similarities
between early China and the Classic Maya, as reconstructed through recently
translated inscriptions: the “stratified universe with bird-perched
cosmic tree and religious personnel interlinking the Upper, Middle, and
Under Worlds,” animal messengers, use of writing mainly for politics and
ritual, veneration of ancestors, and so on (1988, 2000: 7). The states that
emerged in the third millennium in the Middle East, in contrast,
represented a kind of breakthrough to an alternate, more pluralistic model,
that began when gods and their priesthoods came to be seen as independent
from the state. Most of the resulting volume consists of speculations as to
what this breakthrough really involved. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky argued that
the key was the first appearance of notions of freedom and equality in
ancient Mesopotamia, in royal doctrines which saw a social contract between
the rulers of individual city-states and their subjects—which he calls a
“breakout,” and which most contributors agreed should be seen as
“pointing the way towards Western Democracy” (122). In fact, the main
topic of debate soon became who, or what, deserved the credit. Mason
Hammond argued for “The Indo-European Origins of the Concept of a
Democratic Society,” saying that notions of democracy “did not reach
Greece from contact with the Near East or Mesopotamia—where equity and
justice were the gift of the ruler—but stemmed from an Indo-European
concept of a social organization in which sovereignty might be said to
rest, not with the chief, but with the council of elders and the assembly
of arms-bearing males” (59). Gordon Willey, on the other hand, sees
democratic urges as arising from the free market, which he thinks was more
developed in Mesopotamia than China, and largely absent under Maya
kingdoms, where rulers ruled by divine right “and there is no evidence of
any counterbalancing power within the chiefdom or state that could have
held him in check” (29).[227] Linda Schele, the foremost authority on the
Classic Maya, concurs, adding that this shamanic cosmos “is still alive
and functioning today” in “modern Maya communities” (54). Other
scholars try to put in a good word for their own parts of the ancient
world: Egypt, Israel, the Harappan civilization.

At times, these arguments seem almost comical parodies of the kind of logic
I’ve been criticizing in historians: most obviously, the line of
reasoning that assumes that, if there is no direct evidence for something,
it can be treated as if it does not exist. This seems especially
inappropriate when dealing with early antiquity, an enormous landscape on
which archaeology and linguistics can at best throw open a few tiny
windows. For example: the fact that “primitive Celts and Germans” met
in communal assemblies does not in itself prove that communal assemblies
have an Indo-European origin—unless, that is, one can demonstrate that
stateless societies speaking non-Indo-European languages at the time did
not. In fact, the argument seems almost circular, since by “primitive,”
the author seems to mean “stateless” or “relatively egalitarian,”
and such societies almost by definition cannot be ruled autocratically, no
matter what language people speak. Similarly, when characterizing the
Classic Maya as lacking any form of “countervailing institutions”
(Willey describes even the bloodthirsty Aztecs as less authoritarian, owing
to their more developed markets), it doesn’t seem to occur to any of the
authors to wonder what ancient Rome or Medieval England might look like if
they had to be reconstructed exclusively through ruined buildings and
official statements carved in stone.

In fact, if my argument is right, what these authors are doing is searching
for the origins of democracy precisely where they are least likely to find
it: in the proclamations of the states that largely suppressed local forms
of self-governance and collective deliberation, and the
literary-philosophical traditions that justified their doing so. (This, at
least, would help explain why, in Italy, Greece, and India alike, sovereign
assemblies appear at the beginnings of written history and disappear
quickly thereafter.) The fate of the Mayas is instructive here. Sometime in
the late first millennium, Classic Maya civilization collapsed.
Archaeologists argue about the reasons; presumably they always will; but
most theories assume popular rebellions played at least some role. By the
time the Spaniards arrived six hundred years later, Mayan societies were
thoroughly decentralized, with an endless variety of tiny city-states, some
apparently with elected leaders. Conquest took much longer than it did in
Peru and Mexico, and Maya communities have proved so consistently
rebellious that, over the last five hundred years, there has been virtually
no point during which at least some have not been in a state of armed
insurrection. Most ironic of all, the current wave of the global justice
movement was largely kicked off by the EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, a group of largely Maya-speaking rebels in Chiapas, mostly
drawn from campesinos who had resettled in new communities in the Lacandon
rain forest. Their insurrection in 1994 was carried out explicitly in the
name of democracy, by which they meant something much more like
Athenian-style direct democracy than the republican forms of government
that have since appropriated the name. The Zapatistas developed an
elaborate system in which communal assemblies, operating on consensus,
supplemented by women and youth caucuses to counterbalance the traditional
dominance of adult males, are knitted together by councils with recallable
delegates. They claim it to be rooted in, but a radicalization of, the way
that Maya-speaking communities have governed themselves for thousands of
years. We do know that most highland Maya communities have been governed by
some kind of consensus system since we have records: that is, for at least
five hundred years. While it’s possible that nothing of the sort existed
in rural communities during the Classic Maya heyday a little over thousand
years ago, it seems rather unlikely.

Certainly, modern rebels make their own views on the Classic Maya clear
enough. As a Chol-speaking Zapatista remarked to a friend of mine recently,
pointing to the ruins of Palenque, “we managed to get rid of those guys.
I don’t suppose the Mexican government could be all that much of a
challenge in comparison.”

Part V: The Crisis of the State

 
We’re finally back, then, where we began, with the rise of global
movements calling for new forms of democracy. In a way, the main point of
this piece has been to demonstrate that the Zapatistas are nothing unusual.
They are speakers of a variety of Maya languages—Tzeltal, Tojalobal,
Chol, Tzotzil, Mam—originally from communities traditionally allowed a
certain degree of self-governance (largely so they could function as
indigenous labor reserves for ranches and plantations located elsewhere),
who had formed new largely multi-ethnic communities in newly opened lands
in the Lacandon (Collier 1999; Ross 2000; Rus, Hernandez & Mattiace 2003).
In other words, they inhabit a classic example of what I’ve been calling
spaces of democratic improvization, in which a jumbled amalgam of people,
most with at least some initial experience of methods of communal
self-governance, find themselves in new communities outside the immediate
supervision of the state. Neither is there anything particularly new about
the fact that they are at the fulcrum of a global play of influences:
absorbing ideas from everywhere, and their own example having an enormous
impact on social movements across the planet. The first Zapatista encuentro
in 1996, for example, eventually led to the formation of an international
network (People’s Global Action, or PGA), based on principles of
autonomy, horizontality, and direct democracy, that included such disparate
groups as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil;
the Karnataka State Farmer’s Association (KRSS), a Gandhian socialist
direct action group in India; the Canadian Postal Workers’ Union; and a
whole host of anarchist collectives in Europe and the Americas, along with
indigenous organizations on every continent. It was PGA, for instance, that
put out the original call to action against the WTO meetings in Seattle in
November 1999. Even more, the principles of Zapatismo, the rejection of
vanguardism, the emphasis on creating viable alternatives in one’s own
community as a way of subverting the logic of global capital, has had an
enormous influence on participants in social movements that, in some cases,
are at best vaguely aware of the Zapatistas themselves and have certainly
never heard of PGA. No doubt the growth of the Internet and global
communications have allowed the process to proceed much faster than ever
before, and allowed for more formal, explicit alliances; but this does not
mean we are dealing with an entirely unprecedented phenomenon.

One might gauge the importance of the point by considering what happens
when it’s not born constantly in mind. Let me turn here to an author
whose position is actually quite close to my own. In a book called
Cosmopolitanism (2002), literary theorist Walter Mignolo provides a
beautiful summary of just how much Kant’s cosmopolitanism, or the UN
discourse on human rights, was developed within a context of conquest and
imperialism; then invokes Zapatista calls for democracy to counter an
argument by Slavoj Žižek that Leftists need to temper their critiques of
Eurocentrism in order to embrace democracy as “the true European legacy
from ancient Greece onward” (1998: 1009). Mignolo writes:
 

 
The Zapatistas have used the word democracy, although it has a different
meaning for them than it has for the Mexican government. Democracy for the
Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy
but in terms of Maya social organization based on reciprocity, communal
(instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom rather than
epistemology, and so forth… The Zapatistas have no choice but to use the
word that political hegemony imposed, though using that word does not mean
bending to its mono-logic interpretation. Once democracy is singled out by
the Zapatistas, it becomes a connector through which liberal concepts of
democracy and indigenous concepts of reciprocity and community social
organization for the common good must come to terms (Mignolo 2002: 180).
 

 
This is a nice idea. Mignolo calls it “border thinking.” He proposes it
as a model for how to come up with a healthy, “critical
cosmopolitanism,” as opposed to the Eurocentric variety represented by
Kant or Žižek. The problem though, it seems to me, is that in doing so,
Mignolo himself ends up falling into a more modest version of the very
essentializing discourse he’s trying to escape.

First of all, to say “the Zapatistas have no choice but to use the
word” democracy is simply untrue. Of course they have a choice. Other
indigenous-based groups have made very different ones. The Aymara movement
in Bolivia, to select one fairly random example, chose to reject the word
“democracy” entirely, on the grounds that, in their people’s
historical experience, the name has only been used for systems imposed on
them through violence.[228] They therefore see their own traditions of
egalitarian decision-making as having nothing to do with democracy. The
Zapatista decision to embrace the term, it seems to me, was more than
anything else a decision to reject anything that smacked of a politics of
identity, and to appeal for allies, in Mexico and elsewhere, among those
interested in a broader conversation about forms of self-organization—in
much the same way as they also sought to begin a conversation with those
interested in reexamining the meaning of words like “revolution.”
Second, Mignolo, not entirely unlike Lévy-Bruhl, ends up producing yet
another confrontation between apples and oranges. He ends up contrasting
Western theory and indigenous practice. In fact, Zapatismo is not simply an
emanation of traditional Maya practices: its origins have to be sought in a
prolonged confrontation between those practices and, among other things,
the ideas of local Maya intellectuals (many, presumably, not entirely
unfamiliar with the work of Kant), liberation theologists (who drew
inspiration from prophetic texts written in ancient Palestine), and mestizo
revolutionaries (who drew inspiration from the works of Chairman Mao, who
lived in China). Democracy, in turn, did not emerge from anybody’s
discourse. It is as if simply taking the Western literary tradition as
one’s starting point—even for purposes of critique—means authors like
Mignolo always somehow end up trapped within it.

In reality, the “word that political hegemony imposed” is in this case
itself a fractured compromise. If it weren’t, we would not have a Greek
word originally coined to describe a form of communal self-governance
applied to representative republics to begin with. It’s exactly this
contradiction the Zapatistas were seizing on. In fact, it seems impossible
to get rid of. Liberal theorists (e.g., Sartori 1987: 279) do occasionally
evince a desire to simply brush aside Athenian democracy entirely, to
declare it irrelevant and be done with it, but for ideological purposes,
such a move would be simply inadmissible. After all, without Athens, there
would be no way to claim that “the Western tradition” had anything
inherently democratic about it. We would be left tracing back our political
ideals to the totalitarian musings of Plato, or if not, perhaps, to admit
there’s really no such thing as “the West.” In effect, liberal
theorists have boxed themselves into a corner. Obviously, the Zapatistas
are hardly the first revolutionaries to have seized on this contradiction;
but their doing so has found an unusually powerful resonance, this
time—in part, because this is a moment of a profound crisis of the state.

The Impossible Marriage

 
In its essence, I think, the contradiction is not simply one of language.
It reflects something deeper. For the last two hundred years, democrats
have been trying to graft ideals of popular self-governance onto the
coercive apparatus of the state. In the end, the project is simply
unworkable. States cannot, by their nature, ever truly be democratized.
They are, after all, basically ways of organizing violence. The American
Federalists were being quite realistic when they argued that democracy is
inconsistent with a society based on inequalities of wealth; since, in
order to protect wealth, one needs an apparatus of coercion to keep down
the very “mob” that democracy would empower. Athens was a unique case
in this respect because it was, in effect, transitional: there were
certainly inequalities of wealth, even, arguably, a ruling class, but there
was virtually no formal apparatus of coercion. Hence there’s no consensus
among scholars whether it can really be considered a state at all.

It’s precisely when one considers the problem of the modern state’s
monopoly of coercive force that the whole pretense of democracy dissolves
into a welter of contradictions. For example: while modern elites have
largely put aside the earlier discourse of the “mob” as a murderous
“great beast,” the same imagery still pops back, in almost exactly the
form it had in the sixteenth century, the moment anyone proposes
democratizing some aspect of the apparatus of coercion. In the US, for
example, advocates of the “fully informed jury movement,” who point out
that the Constitution actually allows juries to decide on questions of law,
not just of evidence, are regularly denounced in the media as wishing to go
back to the days of lynchings and “mob rule.” It’s no coincidence
that the United States, a country that still prides itself on its
democratic spirit, has also led the world in mythologizing, even deifying,
its police.

Francis Dupuis-Deri (2002) has coined the term “political agoraphobia”
to refer to the suspicion of public deliberation and decision-making that
runs through the Western tradition, just as much in the works of Constant,
Sieyés, or Madison as in Plato or Aristotle. I would add that even the
most impressive accomplishments of the liberal state, its most genuinely
democratic elements—for instance, its guarantees on freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly—are premised on such agoraphobia. It is only once it
becomes absolutely clear that public speech and assembly is no longer
itself the medium of political decision-making, but at best an attempt to
criticize, influence, or make suggestions to political decision-makers,
that they can be treated as sacrosanct. Critically, this agorophobia is not
just shared by politicians and professional journalists, but in large
measure by the public itself. The reasons, I think, are not far to seek.
While liberal democracies lack anything resembling the Athenian agora, they
certainly do not lack equivalents to Roman circuses. The ugly mirror
phenomenon, by which ruling elites encourage forms of popular participation
that continually remind the public just how much they are unfit to rule,
seems, in many modern states, to have been brought to a condition of
unprecedented perfection. Consider here, for example, the view of human
nature one might derive generalizing from the experience of driving to work
on the highway, as opposed to the view one might derive from the experience
of public transportation. Yet the American—or German—love affair with
the car was the result of conscious policy decisions by political and
corporate elites beginning in the 1930s. One could write a similar history
of the television, or consumerism, or, as Polanyi long ago noted, “the
market.”

Jurists, meanwhile, have long been aware that the coercive nature of the
state ensures that democratic constitutions are founded on a fundamental
contradiction. Walter Benjamin (1978) summed it up nicely by pointing out
that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to
be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means by acts
that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before. The
legitimacy of a system of law, thus, necessarily rests on acts of criminal
violence. American and French revolutionaries were, after all, by the law
under which they grew up, guilty of high treason. Of course, sacred kings
from Africa to Nepal have managed to solve this logical conundrum by
placing themselves, like God, outside the system. But as political
theorists from Agamben to Negri remind us, there is no obvious way for
“the people” to exercise sovereignty in the same way. Both the
right-wing solution (constitutional orders are founded by, and can be set
aside by, inspired leaders—whether Founding Fathers, or Führers—who
embody the popular will), and the left-wing solution (constitutional orders
usually gain their legitimacy through violent popular revolutions) lead to
endless practical contradictions. In fact, as sociologist Michael Mann has
hinted (1999), much of the slaughter of the twentieth century derives from
some version of this contradiction. The demand to simultaneously create a
uniform apparatus of coercion within every piece of land on the surface of
the planet, and to maintain the pretense that the legitimacy of that
apparatus derives from “the people,” has led to an endless need to
determine who, precisely, “the people” are supposed to be.

In all the varied German law courts of the last eighty years—from Weimar
to Nazi to communist DDR to the Bundesrepublik—the judges have used the
same opening formula: “In Namen des Volkes,” “In the Name of the
People.” American courts prefer the formula “The Case of the People
versus X” (Mann 1999: 19).

In other words, “the people” must be evoked as the authority behind the
allocation of violence, despite the fact that any suggestion that the
proceedings be in any way democratized is likely to be greeted with horror
by all concerned. Mann suggests that pragmatic efforts to work out this
contradiction, to use the apparatus of violence to identify and constitute
a “people” that those maintaining that apparatus feel are worthy of
being the source of their authority, has been responsible for at least
sixty million murders in the twentieth century alone.

It is in this context that I might suggest that the anarchist
solution—that there really is no resolution to this paradox—is really
not all that unreasonable. The democratic state was always a contradiction.
Globalization has simply exposed the rotten underpinnings, by creating the
need for decision-making structures on a planetary scale where any attempt
to maintain the pretense of popular sovereignty, let alone participation,
would be obviously absurd. The neo-liberal solution, of course, is to
declare the market the only form of public deliberation one really needs,
and to restrict the state almost exclusively to its coercive function. In
this context, the Zapatista response—to abandon the notion that
revolution is a matter of seizing control over the coercive apparatus of
the state, and instead proposing to refound democracy in the
self-organization of autonomous communities—makes perfect sense. This is
the reason an otherwise obscure insurrection in southern Mexico caused such
a sensation in radical circles to begin with. Democracy, then, is for the
moment returning to the spaces in which it originated: the spaces in
between. Whether it can then proceed to engulf the world depends perhaps
less on what kind of theories we make about it, but on whether we honestly
believe that ordinary human beings, sitting down together in deliberative
bodies, would be capable of managing their own affairs as well as elites,
whose decisions are backed up by the power of weapons, are of managing it
for them—or even whether, even if they wouldn’t, they have the right to
be allowed to try. For most of human history, faced with such questions,
professional intellectuals have almost universally taken the side of the
elites. It is rather my impression that, if it really comes down to it, the
overwhelming majority are still seduced by the various ugly mirrors and
have no real faith in the possibilities of popular democracy. But perhaps
this too could change.

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